Standalone stories, free to read.

Short Story

A Funeral

I am marred by a friendship I once had. He was at the funeral and I was not invited to his wedding. Another friend of mine had received an invitation and informed me, and surely my friend at the funeral had known that.

We gathered around the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. The rabbi started praying. I saw faces of mothers of my childhood friends who were now struck by crows feet and pockmarks and blemishes, and I saw such sadness in their eyes as they saw their friend lowered into the earth. They were the same but their faces had aged tremendously. Brunette and blonde hair started to shine with gray streaks. Purses stayed old, little flowers and clips, in the styles of their time. Modern purses were too boxy and minimal for them. I believe the purses were more sentimental than convenient at that point.

Something inside of me is tormented by a creature that creeps up my throat and tries to speak on my behalf. I tell the creature to shut up and I try to shove him down my throat but the creature is very strong and somehow, without much effort, crawls back up in the most bitter of times.

When I walked up to my friend, I put a hand across his shoulder to say hello. He smiled, but his eyes saw me as an acquaintance, which really hurt me because I had known him for twenty five years, since we were five years old, where we spent most of our time on the playground playing games we made up in our head. He was someone I thought was a close friend and would remain a close friend until we would grow the same wrinkles our parents had. We exchanged neutered greetings. He didn't say much. He spoke without emotion, then asked his partner if he had met me. I had met him perhaps five or six times. I froze. For some reason I didn't shake his hand. I felt so embarrassed by the fact immediately after and there was no pleasant way to address it. He must've thought I was a homophone for not shaking his soon to be husband's hand. I simply said hello and good to see you again. I introduced my girlfriend since neither my friend or his partner had met her before. Shortly after he went off to talk to others who were grieving. Twenty five years of friendship I felt had been diluted to that, and I was so deeply ashamed of myself for I felt that it was my fault. I felt that I had tainted something great we once had. Of course, my girlfriend, my friends, or anyone else I talked to would simply say that we drifted apart, we went down different paths and as time went on, it hardened each other. I vehemently disagree, since if I cared about the relationship, I would have been more active to see him, talk with him, make plans together and keep in touch. In that regard, I believe I have failed. I'm not sure if he felt the same. Maybe he simply thought we had drifted apart, and I wasn't sure if he felt sadness or mere acceptance with this fact.

The creature grew strong enough to climb up my throat, and unfortunately I was near my friend. I told him that it was fine that he didn't invite me to his wedding. When the words left my mouth the creature slid down my throat as quickly as it came up. My friend looked at me. I couldn't read his face. It was disappointed, perhaps aggravated or just confused. I couldn't tell. He said he needed to go pay his respects to the family and left.

My father always told me a man must pull his own plow, that machinery or the backs of others is as reliable as a paper boat. Perhaps this is why me and my friend grew apart. I was too busy pulling my own plow.

My mother gave me cantaloupe in a Tupperware to take home. She told me to make sure I paid my respects to the family. I looked over to make sure my friend wasn't talking to them. I went over and gave them hugs. I hugged the daughter of the deceased mother. She had also known my friend since we all went to the same elementary school. The creature climbed up my throat and almost asked her why I wasn't invited to his wedding. I swallowed the creature down, gave the daughter another hug and offered my condolences.

We then formed a half circle around the grave. I made eye contact with my friend once more but only briefly. For a moment I thought that he could not be thinking of anything else besides me. I felt sick trying to read his face. I felt sick for thinking I took up all the real estate in his head. I hid behind a taller gentleman, staring into the fabric of his suit. We listened to the rabbi give parting words. The sky was birdless and the street next to the cemetery hummed with cars. I didn't look at my friend again.

They began shoveling dirt onto the coffin, and when there was plenty enough, two lines were formed and the bereaved family walked through them. I felt me and my friend could also walk through those two lines, receiving condolences and hugs and comforting hands on the shoulder, for what we had twenty five years ago seemed to also be buried under the dirt.

Short Story

Five Pounds

I hear a younger me whispering through the echoes, the echoes reverberating throughout this godforsaken house.

I peek my head through the curtain shrouding the one small window in the basement to look up at the violent sun, overbearing with light. Eyes squinting, I draw the curtain. I line everything in my toiletry bag on the bathroom counter like hummels on the shelves at grandma's house. Medications, ointments, everything I need in case I have to leave the house. My hamstrings start to hurt. The pain stretches down the rest of my leg, two tiny creatures playing tug of war with my tendon. Then it ripples from the side of my lower back, in the same spot it always does.

In my hands I hold HDMI cords, power cords, chargers, USB hubs, their wires running along the paths of my veins. I plug, unplug, fiddle, wrap, coil, everything set up so delicately and perfectly. Like vines, my wires take over the old wooden desk in the basement. The desk looks like it belonged in an old boarding school riddled with corporal punishment—nuns wielding rulers, principals with paddles hung in their office like decor, teachers screaming like it's basic training. But now it supports the technological marvels of the modern age. Transistors and CPUs and GPUs and silicon chips, things they'd think belonged on rocket ships.

Then the dull hum of my computer booting up. A white noise like the sound of a lazy river gently rushing past strewn boulders and felled trunks, something I can sleep to. Two monitors stare back at me, mimicking my laptop background of a forest strewn with leaves and moss, the trunks of the trees riddled with lichen. The thought of being there for a moment gives me mental hives, anxiety, a thought about what I would have to bring to exist comfortably. I let the tab of Ativan rest on my tongue before dry swallowing. A pull request from Enzo, one of the other engineers on the team. More spaghetti code, like the true Italian he is. Haskell will accept it blindly. No matter, as long as it works, which it will. But not very well.

Everything is unfamiliar, and some cauldron inside of me begins to boil.

They send me to Cape Cod, but I prefer to be anywhere else. I'm put in a six bedroom house near Hyannis Port. Three baths. Two kitchens. Washer and dryer. Three-thousand square feet. White. The inside plagued with aphorisms written on frames, throw pillows, wood blocks hung with pieces of twine. Sandy Kisses & Starfish Wishes. You are now entering a Stress Free Zone. The Beach is my Happy Place. The wood-paneled basement has a bar counter, two pull out beds, an L couch, vintage posters, a TV big enough to measure the wingspan of a teenager, a top shelf lined with Hess trucks, all of them facing the same direction, stuck in perpetual traffic, and a wooden chest with every home movie from the early 2000s.

I call the house godforsaken because it reminds me of the house I grew up in. The large bay window, the antique wall clocks, the spindle trees and shrouding maples. The basement, like my childhood bedroom, with minimal light and maximum me time. A heavy wood door to muffle the voices upstairs. I decide to spend all my time here, sitting at the old wooden desk.

After a few hours of coding, gigifrying my brain with digital letters written by myself and millions of others, I go to Twitter, arguing with people in Monospace and Helvetica. Then I order a lobster roll off DoorDash and take a long hot shower. The rest of the team is set to arrive in the evening. It was cheaper to rent a house than individual hotel rooms, according to the event manager.

They brought me 'cause the sales director made eye contact with me six months ago on the one day I went into the office, a probability that could be shown in hexadecimals.

"You're on the product side, right? Under Haskell?"

I told him I was. I was wearing a shirt of a llama in maroon and saffron robes. The Dalai Llama. He invited me to a sales conference the following week. I was there to troubleshoot and not talk and I did both, which he liked.

"Sacha doesn't say a damn word. The man's a machine!"

Last year, our team indulged in the over-saturated consumerism of Las Vegas. Tomahawk steaks for the Oxford-collared, wrists adored in dive watches, baptized in cologne and lathered in mousse, Caesar salads and chicken piccatas for the T-shirt and sweatpants and acne.

Then we went to the blackjack table, the wallet in my pocket sweating more than my forehead. The Oxford-collared took their daily ration of Zyn and pulled slips of Grant and Franklin and folded the wrinkles on their faces on the felt table. I pulled out forty dollars, the two Jacksons laying weakly next to multiples of Ulysses and Benjamin, lackluster, like I just lost a presidential pissing contest.

Three hands, the dealer landed blackjack on two of them. I was already out of money. Oxford-collars were getting tugged, tightening around bead-sweated necks. The dealer noticed their faces. "This is varsity, baby. That's why there are no seatbelts on those chairs. The rich are already rich!"

An invite to the pool was quickly shot down. I scurried back up to my room like a clam without its shell. I ordered lots of room service, stayed in my room as much as I could, and spoke a dozen sentences the entire trip. Afterwards I told the sales director to find another IT lackey. "No way, you troubleshoot faster than anyone under Haskell." Apparently Haskell agreed, and told me a promotion was in sight. With 7% etched into my eyes, I didn't fight any further, which is why two months later I find myself in this basement in Cape Cod.

✦

The lobster roll arrives by the time I'm out of the shower. I hear the delivery girl knock on the door. I know it's a girl because I hear her voice. DoorDash! I ignore her and hope she gets the hint to just leave the food at the door. She does, and I imagine a raised eyebrow and nothing more.

I grab the food and rush downstairs. I sit on the ground and open my laptop, wrap myself in a blanket only to have my chest sat on by the entire Roman army. The wifi logo is gray. I can't get online. I call the event manager on shoddy cell service. "I'll call the owner and get back to you. In the meantime, you could go to Kalmas beach."

The UV index was nine. Humidity over 80%. Eighty-one but felt like eighty-eight. I'd get a sunburn. Or my neck would hive out and rash. I'd have to apply my 1% hydrocortisone cream, then my zinc oxide sunscreen, which had the consistency of oatmeal. I'm wearing my contacts and they often hurt. I'd have to bring my ziplock bag of solution and case, and my glasses, the case, a cloth and a bottle of lens clean in case the lens got dirty. I'd have to bring Zaditor eyedrops, packets of Zyrtec, Nasacort spray for my allergies. Inhaler for my asthma. My sciatica was shooting down my leg on the drive over so I'd need to bring my resistance bands in case I needed to do some clamshells to relieve the pain. My water bottle in case I got thirsty. My polarized sunglasses to protect my eyes from the sun. My little fan in case it was too hot and the breeze was too gentle or the water was too lukewarm or sand-grained or riddled with seaweed to enjoy.

I'd wear shorts and a white t-shirt, exposing my arms and legs built like PVC pipes with sockets. If it was too warm, I'd have nothing more to strip down to. I'd rather sweat than expose the rest of my body to UV rays. And I'd have to apply my 1% hydrocortisone and my zinc oxide oatmeal-consistent sunscreen all over.

Then there were the noises. The cries of happy children, the drab chattering of parents, the whining of a newborn stubborn to put on a swimsuit. Cacophony of noises usually caused migraines, for which there was no one medication that worked. Instead, I found a regiment of cold packs, ear plugs, and acetaminophen to work. If my head and neck began to bulge, I'd put in ear plugs and put the pack to my forehead. If that didn't work I'd take two Tylenol, an Aspirin, and a cup of coffee. If that didn't work two hours later, I'd take two ibuprofen. Two hours after that? Sumatriptan. Then another sumatriptan, double the dosage. Migraine persists? Urgent care.

So I'd have to bring headphones and the cold pack, and some pills just in case. But the cold pack would get warm quickly so I'd have to bring more pills. Then there was the whole business of my brain. Ativan for anxiety and a multi-colored ball like a bowl of Fruit Loops for me to pick at to ease my trichotillomania. The bag I'd have to bring was getting heavy.

I don't go to Kalmas. I stay inside. I would avoid the beach and the promenade. I'd sit at the booth during the conference, saying nothing, looking at nobody unless necessary, go to the job-retaining-dependent team dinner, nibble a few leaves from my cobb salad, then head home.

I use my phone as a hotspot, but the service is only two bars, like an unfinished podium. No video over five minutes will load, and the ones under keep lagging. I have enough service to chat with my online girlfriend.

She doesn't give me anything else, and I'll be damned if I start jerking off to ASCII.

She must be out at Applebee's, steak and ribs and cardiovascular problems. I take another Ativan and watch YouTube videos on my phone for two hours on crappy ping. A two minute video takes four minutes but I power through the boredom. I open twenty tabs to load twenty videos but it doesn't help. My eyes strain and I have to put eyedrops in, then I'm on Instagram reels for the next hour. Something political is happening so I e-brake slide over to Twitter, shout and correct some people, my brow furrowed as I type, I send them my digital doves.

My wrists swell. I feel like I'm walking with bricks in my hands.

A message from a co-worker: all flights at JFK postponed. Something to do with the weather.

A man on YouTube with a curly-haired mullet and caterpillar mustache, possibly open to polyamory with his much more attractive girlfriend, gives more details. A technical outage at the airport caused by strong winds. Not sure when it'll be resolved. Possibly tonight, most likely not.

The event manager calls me. "Dinner is still on for tomorrow night, but the team won't make it to the conference. We may get refunded for the day but still need to talk to the event director. Crazy world!"

I hated that she ended with that. It was already a crazy world without the outage. I ask about the WiFi and she tells me she hasn't heard from the owner. Perhaps I could go to a cafe. I decide against it. I order another lobster roll, this time calling the place because the service is so bad and to tell them to leave the food at the door.

The political thing has grown tentacles and now Twitter's front lines have been penetrated by a phalanx of groypers. I'm unable to load the verbal war crimes. Service down to one bar, the smallest one. I load one of the posts, the profile pic of himself (brave), a fat man wide enough to live in Carl Sagan's flatland. I write my rage-induced reply, hit Post, nothing happens, and I trebuchet my phone into the couch. I switch over to YouTube but all I get is the skeleton screen. The lobster roll arrives because I hear the delivery girl knocking. I go upstairs, almost hitting my head on the doorframe, Beware of Dog Kisses written on a block of wood. I see her through the window. She sees me, gives a half-smile. I stand in the hallway like a wax figure until her smile morphs into a frown. She leaves the bag at the door and drives off.

Back in the basement with my lobster roll, the service drains from my phone like sap oozing from a tree. I'm not getting any messages. The wind starts to pick up.

I take out my burning contacts and put on glasses, brush my teeth, take an ibuprofen, a Zyrtec, put a cold towel to my forehead. I lay on the folding bed in the basement and stare at the Hess trucks, thinking about the Hot Wheels® from my childhood, but the thought gets too fun and I puncture it. I go back online. I live in the darkness, consuming like the good nocturnal beast that I am until my body demands its rest.

✦

In the morning the sun streaks the hardwood floors, thin bands of yellow like the fingers of God pressing into the house.

I hang a towel over the window.

The event manager calls me before I can cook my eggs. It's about the refund. She asks if I can go to the conference and find the director. She'll email me the rest. I squeeze my multi-colored stress ball before she can even hang up.

In my backpack I bring everything. Everything inside rattles. Five pounds worth of medications and creams and ointments and eyewear and other supplies so I can operate outside. I take a Zyrtec, put two Zaditor drops in my eyes, and take a refundable Uber to the convention center at the Cape Cod Inn.

Inside there's air conditioning and WiFi and I almost cry. About ten of the fifty booths have people in it. The whole place smelled like a giant pencil eraser. Foamboard posters, retractable banners, stretch fabric displays. Automation from beginning to end. Powerful AI-Driven Solutions, High-Quality Plans, Energize Your Savings. Lanyards tugging at necks. Coordinated outfits. Like a sanitized, HR-friendly Vegas with less marquee signs and strippers and blow.

"The storm in New York messed up a lot of flights." I walk with the conference director through the line of booths. Behind two large doors are a third of the expected attendees. "Not just for the exhibitors."

His wire-frame glasses gleam from the fluorescent light panels above. His tie is tied too tight, or his voice is just that high. He seems like an honest man. Boring, but honest. I tell him about our flight issues, and recite the exact script the event manager emailed me about the refund. He said it would be processed in seven business days. Great. He extends his hand out to me and I reluctantly shake it, looking haphazardly for a hand sanitizer dispenser. As I head toward the exit he says, "You aren't going to stay?"

/ compile error / A sound secretes from my mouth before I can respond.

"You might as well," he adds. "You're already here."

I stumble my words to a confusing answer, something about having to go back to the house to make sure I locked the door. His head cocks, but doesn't think much of it.

"No worries. Also your entire team isn't here, makes sense. We'll see you tomorrow. Hopefully people are able to get in by then."

I leave through the large doors to see attendees standing, sitting, waiting, gripping lattes in their hands, turtle-shelled with backpacks, some with their laptops already open. I pass through as if they were a membrane and out onto the street where I get into the same Uber that brought me here.

✦

The wind howls outside. Gusts up to forty miles per hour. The wood paneling of the house rattles. Whatever storm was in New York was heading to Cape Cod.

"Meterologists predict it'll die out before it hits." The event manager sounds excited and scared at the same time. "There'll be some rain and it'll get windy, but shouldn't be too bad."

I put headphones on to tune out the howling. In the closet I find a bathrobe with pockets and feel myself oozing back into my plush cave, not wanting to leave the basement, to inject ambient music with birdsong in my ear canal so like a sluggish river, I may drift in one direction, never to think about what's behind me.

Then my phone vibrates. A Slack message from the sales director: how's the conference?

The stress ball finds its way in my palm, locked in a vice grip. He says the event manager said I would hold down the fort. I look at his profile picture. A light blue blazer over a white collared shirt, dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard that covers his vulpine jaw. Confident and composed, one that says "sign on the dotted line and give me your money." I've seen his other face; one of power and rage, one that'll go scorched Earth over a $5,000 deal. A face that climaxes to military drone strike videos. His mouth neutral, lips straighter than his heterosexuality. He asked me one time at a conference if I liked girls. He asked because sometimes I paint my nails and wear earrings. I keep my gender fluid but my pronouns firm, tight like the molecular structure of a Thwomp. I told him I liked girls. I even dated one—perpetually frizzy hair with awful arm tattoos that looked as if she had opened a sticker book and stuck them all over herself. In my head, she sits on the windowsill. Her eyes catch mine, then she fades as a hairy hand reeked of Dolce & Gabbana cologne slaps my back, as if to say 'atta boy, I knew you were one of the normal ones.

I respond to him on Slack, regurgitate the things I saw at the convention center. I tell him it's slow. Not a lot of people. Only ten of the fifty booths are attended.

Shit. Okay, just hand out business cards and pamphlets to everyone. They should be at the booth already.

I didn't even go to our booth. I have no idea if anything is there. But at this point I didn't care. They'll get here tomorrow and I can just say I handed them out and nobody was interested. I push down an insatiable urge to strangle the event manager with my phone charger.

Impatience chips away at me. I update the message_response_time constant in the config file. Comment out Math.random().

The battery drains from my phone like sap oozing from a tree. Then my face goes pale. Slack message from the sales director. Send a pic of the conference hall. VP wants to see the turnout.

I look up at the Hess trucks that demand me to think of my Hot Wheels®, a time where I didn't need my medications or cold packs or ear plugs, how the outside was something to be explored instead of feared. But the feeling is fleeting. It escapes me in seconds.

I take off my headphones. The wind rattles the windows, scaring the rats underneath living on breadcrumbs.

The UV index is at six even though the sky is blanketed in gray. I slap 1% hydrocortisone cream and zinc oxide sunscreen on my face. I take an Advil, apply more eye drops, and bring everything else in a tote bag.

✦

Back home in Louisiana I would stay in my apartment, only leaving when necessary. Groceries and household items delivered by Amazon, food by a meal delivery service, haircuts self-administered, appointments traveled to by car and spent indoors, a foldable treadmill for exercise in my bathroom, entertainment on my laptop, my phone. I don't need to leave. Everything that could kill me is outside. Malaria? That's outside. So are ticks and their repulsive lyme disease. Plants with spores that eat at your brain. Bark from trees that can puncture your skin. Striking cliffs and sinking oceans. Uneven ground. Bears, rattlesnakes, poison dart frogs. People with cruel intentions or doped up on whatever new drug makes them violent. I can see them all from inside. There's no reason to leave. But I hate that it's more pleasant to be inside. Back in my apartment is a stencil drawing of rolling hills behind a green pasture, and despite its beauty, all I can think of is the pollen, the weed grass, the sneezing and itching and coughing. Inside is safe, and every uncomfortable and awful thing is outside.

Five pounds tugs at my shoulder. The air is dry. From my tote bag I pull my water bottle and lip balm. The convention center is a buzzing of sounds. Even the cacophony from a third of the attendees gives me a migraine, puncturing through my headphones, one unquelled by the Advil. I have my bottle of sumatriptan but I save it.

"Good to see you're back."

The conference director says it in stride. He has places to be. A clipboard clenched in his right hand like it's an extension of his body. When I look at him, he's already halfway down the row of exhibitors, but he still shouts back at me "We're wrapping up a few hours early 'cause the storm."

Our booth has a folding table and a single chair. There's a tiny banner with our company name written in black in a font you'd find in an obituary—generic, boring, like Times New Roman and Arial conceived a child. The flyers are sealed in a brown box with FLYERS scrawled in black sharpie. I leave the box unopened, take a picture of the conference, and prepare to leave.

"You're with Intellinet!"

It's a woman from the exhibitor booth next to us. She has many questions about our products. She wants to become a distributor, forge a strategic partnership, create extra sales channels, yada-yada-yada. My head swells. I'm unprepared for this conversation. My words come out nervous, jagged, incoherent, as if I recently suffered twenty concussions. She's confused but polite, realizes I'm not one of the sales guys, as if my thick glasses, unkempt beard, trembling hands, loose jeans and headphones weren't enough clues.

"I'll just reach out online," she finally says, and escapes back to her booth.

Two sales-looking guys from across the row look at me and snicker. They try to hide it by looking up at the ceiling, or down at their hush puppies. Oxford shirts, like the sales people at my company. Indian lions are as ferocious as African lions, only their habitat differs. The oxford shirts laugh at vulnerable people trying to improve their lives, not knowing how much their feet hurt, how much their eyes strain, how much their body aches. They don't understand that you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you're wearing sandals made of tape.

On the Uber ride back I learn that the storm is hitting Cape Cod. Meteorologists on TV call it "rapid intensification." The hurricane was moonlighting as a category three, then decided to show its true nature as a five. The driver smelled sour like asparagus piss. The wind was knocking at the car. Even with my headphones on, it rattles my skull. I take a sumatriptan. An alarm blares from the driver's phone. He looks at it, then looks at me in the rearview mirror.

"You need to get out."

I stammer. "What?"

"You need to get out. They just ordered an evacuation."

"Can't you drop me back home?"

"I need to get to my family."

We're two blocks from the house. He pulls over and waits for me to get out.

"Can you at least drive me to the front?"

He obliges, runs through a red light to get me there. When I get out, he apologizes but says if I had a family I would understand, which unnerves me and makes me think MKultra should have run longer. The wind batters the stop lights, swinging from wires like erratic trapeze artists. Tree branches bend forcefully, their leaves tearing from the stems. The wind smacks my face as I fidget in my pocket for the keys. Their metal teeth munch on the fabric of my pants. In one hostile jerk, I rip them out of my pocket, tearing a hole in my pants. As I jam the key into the hole the wind punches me and my ears go ringing. A million cuckoo clocks striking the top of the hour, all going off at once. I throw myself inside, stumble to the ground as the force of the wind slams the door shut with the force of an ex-lover. The house quivers, and I find myself unable to get up or reach my sumatriptan.

I am surrounded by violently practical people. Many times they tried to make a change. Agoraphobia was the word thrown around at my therapy sessions, which took place in my apartment. I need to make a change. I can't keep running on a Möbius strip. I need to go outside, be around people, not be cooped up indoors, or as my younger nephew put it, touch grass. My mother said it was getting out there. Her friends, all with the same short haircut and center console stuffed with Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, parroted her. My father said nothing, which makes sense if you're stuck in an urn. They do not understand because they did not live in my bedroom the way I did. A forcefield from the outside world, away from everyone and everything that could harm me.

I think of Kalmas beach and hate myself for not going. Perhaps a younger me goes and brings a pouch to collect seashells. Then like tendrils, other thoughts grow from the original. I think about having to carry it back, keep it in my suitcase, make sure none of them break, bring them through TSA, onto the plane and back home where I take them out and decide where to put them. I find all of these steps too laborious. I think about skipping rocks, but worry about my rotator cuff, about my labrum, fearful of a tear and having to keep my arm in a sling. In my head, I slice off those thoughts but they grow tenfold, a mythical hydra, infinite heads. They overtake me until I finally scream and there's nothing to hear except the stream of the shower.

I scratch anti-dandruff shampoo into my scalp. The tiles have little pictures of seashells and starfish and I want to punch my fists into them until they're painted maroon. I step out and let the water from my body drip onto the bathroom tile. I take one of the towels to dry off, the other still hangs over the window.

My phone blares again.

Hurricane warning in effect: Mandatory Evacuation. Zone A, B and C.

Zone A, B, and C. On a map they swallow all of Cape Cod. Evacuation of the entire peninsula. The event manager sends me nearby shelters, says to get a hold of a taxi and get out of town. Reimbursable, of course. I peel the corner of the towel from the window to see furious clouds. I run upstairs and look out the bay window. The trees rustle. Slacked telephone wires jiggle. The rain picks up, and I feel myself being pulled outside. My hand reaches for the doorknob. It jiggles from the wind. I turn it and step outside. I slap my hand that aches for a stress ball. I leave my headphones, my bag of creams and ointments, the bottle of sumatriptan stuffed at the bottom. All I have are my glasses to see. Perhaps that's all I need.

The sky is marbled in anger. The storm rages near the beach, and I run toward it.

Back at the house my phone buzzes on the L couch. Her empathyLevel calibrated too high for someone like me. Ones and zeros concerned for my health. Billions of transistors working to keep my sanity. I think about retreating back inside. The thought grows like a mighty oak tree before I reach the street. I let it atrophy and continue walking.

I reach Kalmas beach. The smell of saltwater slaps my face, then the sand. The tide has come in, almost kissing the entry gate. The once smooth blue water sparkling in whitecaps is now vicious and disturbed, waves crashing into where there was once a natural retaining wall of kelp and seaweed, all of which now swirling in the water like vegetables in a stew.

The wind picks off the shingles of a white building. An American flag on a pole flutters violently, its resilience is almost impressive. Little treasures are buried in the sand. A pale, sunglasses, a sock. A gust knocks me off my feet and I eat a helping of sand and sea shells. My head is pounding, heart racing. I don't think about the UV index, my neck rashing out, the pain rippling from my back. I don't think about creams or allergies or migraines. I don't think about my sumatriptan, the tasteless pellet of it melting on my tongue before it goes down. The storm doesn't allow me to. It hits with fury.

I'm stuck, but I'm here.

The last thing I see is a lone seagull gliding above. A tiny white rip in the gray blanket of sky. My glasses are knocked off, buried somewhere in the sand. I can only see blurry, amorphous shapes. I walk like a drunkard over the dune grass, stumbling in the shape of a parabola thrown like a boomerang. In an instant saltwater nips at my ankles. The dune grass now wet like strands of silk caress coil my legs. I walk backwards until the saltwater recedes. It doesn't. It grows taller, biting at my knees.

I wander aimlessly. I can't see anything and I do what I have ridiculed others for doing—I pray. I don't know who I pray to, but I pray. Nothing is sharp or in focus but engraved into the sky is my life, as clear as ever. The world with an enormous mouth looking back at me. I want to stop cosplaying as a well-adjusted man. I want to love the world instead of hate it with scorn. I want to cry and not be called a faggot.

The water sinks, my feet are no longer submerged. The corner of a shingle digs into my foot. It's dark but I make out the structure. High above is the sound of a sail straining against a gale. My arm reaches out to it. Tall and firm, rooted in the ground. Like lichen I cling myself to the flagpole, both arms wrapped around it. A tear falls from my cheek. I am finally part of the world. A gust throws off my balance and thrusts me into the pole and everything all at once is gone.

The sun wakes me up, so does the throbbing from my skull. I caress my forehead and realize I'm on the floor of the concrete parking lot. The sky's gray blanket rings around a blue marble. The wind has died. The water is calm. The flag hangs limp from the pole, only to flap here and there like a flailing fish.

I find my glasses half-buried in a nearby dune. I walk back toward the house. The wreckage is enormous. Scattered debris litters the roads. An overturned sedan. Trees ripped from their roots. But somehow, the house stands.

White with a gable roof, clad wrapped in white clapboard siding with tan and pink hydrangeas blooming on all sides like little brains. White butterflies flap around daylilies, like scraps of paper came to life. The backyard has a swing set hanging from a wooden beam. The drill holes off-centered, brackets still clinging to their Home Depot barcodes, a summer DIY project a father undertook for his children. The rest of the playground factory is built—monkey bars, a sand pit, a slide, little stairs, a climbing wall with grips like chewed pieces of gum stuck to it.

How I relish the blinding sun. My creams stuck in some thoughtless abyss I don't care to pull out. I squint my eyes and sit in a rocking chair perched atop a ledge overlooking the backyard. An urge, actually more like a compulsive reflex, jerks my hand into my pocket for my phone. I grab it like a limb gone haywire, batting it away as if it had a mind of its own, a mind I had to discipline.

I look up at the blue marble, drifting toward the east.

The wind begins to pick up. I lean my head back and look out onto the backyard. I think about my HotWheels®, lining my cabinet shelves instead of racing on the brick-laid patio, the polished oak handrails, the clumps of dirt and grass in the backyard—with engine revving noises, launched them into catastrophe. Instead they sat like lemons in a dealership, collecting dust and begging for maintenance. I think about how one day the slide was something to throw myself down and another was to fear an injury from it. When my room became my world, the actual world made itself uninhabitable.

But all my urges have dissipated like a fine mist.

I'm five pounds lighter.

I think about calling my mother, texting an old friend, ripping through the hard exterior stitched over me. I think about many things, then nothing at all.

I rock further back into the chair, my gaze straight into the sky. The spindle trees begin to shiver. Then sway. Shingles of the house are torn off. The gable roof collapses. The pink hydrangeas are plucked and thrown into a tempest. The swing set doesn't stand a chance. It's thrown into a fury. The blue marble has passed, the blanket of gray has returned. It throws shingles off the roof, bends the spindle trees at the crown, launches scattered debris up in the air. I can't help it. Before it launches me out of it, I rock further back in my chair and laugh.

Short Story

They Always Grow Out Of Them

I'm thinking of you again. There are times when I wish it was an accident or an illness, something out of my control. Something that others can offer sympathy for. What you did gives me no sympathy, only concern for what I might've done, how wicked I must've been.

The line is at a standstill so I put the car in park. In idle it shivers like a wet dog. The undercarriage strangled in rust. A dial on the dashboard points to a red bar. An angel living inside the guts strums her lyre and breathes through the hose. The heat comes through the vents like a prayer. Outside the cold is bitter. It devours the color in your skin. The gray-swollen sky stings with rain, slicking the pavement and battering the windshield. The tires of passing cars bite at the wet roads, hissing like a lit fuse. Autumn leaves once corn-yellow now brown and crumpled coat the ground under the plucked tree like spilled dog food. The woman in front of me has a whole living room in her trunk. She fumbles with a polka-dotted umbrella. With the help of a man in a blue vest, they unload books, lamps, rugs, clocks, pillows, and framed paintings. Behind me are six other cars ready to unload old knick knacks, dust-covered belongings, possessions from estates, gifts from ex-lovers, clothes that don't fit.

My third and final trip to Goodwill. I exhale.

I restrain myself from looking in the back where the car seat was once strapped in. I buckle you in and at first you protest, demanding a snack. Then you fall asleep two miles into the drive to grandma and grandpa's, a belly full of gummy bears. While you sleep, I argue with your father.

I donated the carseat on the first trip, knowing we would never have another child. You were plenty for me and your father. How you enjoyed drawing on the walls with crayons, how you demanded Eggo waffles for breakfast, how you insisted on jumping from the swing to do a cool trick before you came in for dinner.

On your third birthday, I began tracking your height on the wall by the stairs. Your father wrote the first entry, letters off-centered, randomly capitalized, a four possibly moonlighting as a nine, then I would write the rest in letters intricately flourished like filigree. All of them in permanent marker. Years later you try to scrub them off. Water and a hand rag doesn't cut it. You huff and puff and storm up the carpeted steps to your room. The ink is left smeared but legible.

For your next birthday I buy you white pajamas patterned in trucks. I buy them big so you'd have them for longer. You sit on the couch with cheeks flushed in crimson, ready to cry for some unknown reason.

"But trucks are your favorite," I say to placate you.

You cry for two hours, then you wear the pajamas every night before bed for the next two years.

Years later, I take you to buy shoes, but every time the employee begins to tie them on your feet you frown.

"Do I have to tie them every time?" you ask.

I tell you you do. You demand slip on shoes and slide off the ones on your feet with your heels. I look at the employee who says their selection is limited. We drive all over town for new shoes. Three separate department stores and a Foot Locker and still no luck. They either didn't have your size or you didn't like the color or the material. Leather was too hard, so was canvas and rubber, and you only wanted blue. Then we come across a tiny shoe store squeezed between a post office and a nail salon. A bell rings as you open the front door. The owner, a large, lumbering old man in a striped shirt and thin-rimmed spectacles, his beard an avalanche of copper wires, gets down on one knee to be at face height with you.

"Are you the lucky lad who's getting new shoes today?"

You nod. You even flash a smile. "But I don't want any laces."

He smiles back. "That won't be a problem."

They're perfect. Blue slip-on sneakers made of foam. Something astronauts in the fifties might've worn on a morning jog. And they're in your size. You put your old shoes in the new shoebox and wear the slip-ons.

You were so happy the first day you wore them to school. Then one day a few weeks later, you said you would never wear them again.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because all the other kids wear shoes with laces."

✦

You loved baseball. I remember when he first took you to Big 5 to buy your own glove. You wanted to be a pitcher, to throw sliders like Randy, curveballs like Koufax, no-hitters like Nolan. You spent hours with your father playing catch in the backyard on the cool grass until the sun cowered behind the roof and the sky warmed with pink. I saw you throw baseball after baseball at the swings you used to jump off of, trying to hit the cords that held them up. One night while you were soundly asleep, I put up a net in the backyard and taped targets to it. The next morning you rushed to your father, thanking him. I never told you this, but he never thanked me. He just looked at me while you hugged his torso, burrowing your face into his chest.

The same year your father left was the same year you didn't make the team.

I donated the glove on the second trip. You screamed at me after I urged you to keep it. Get rid of it. Throw it away. You never wanted to play again. I went while you were at school. One day the mitt was on your dresser and the next it was gone. You didn't make a fuss about it. You never did. You didn't care about baseball anymore and you never would. And sadly that was true.

✦

The rain has let up. The woman drops the wooden coffee table, one of its legs breaks off and leaves chippings on the pavement. Another man in a blue vest comes over with a broom and dustpan. The pieces cling to the wet ground, resisting the teeth of the broom. The car behind me honks, like I can do anything to move the line any quicker.

✦

By middle school you were fed up with our cul-de-sac nestled inside a suburban sprawl with more nooks and curves than a coiled python. I used money from the divorce to put you in private school. It was far from home and it was hard to make friends. I knew that even if you never told me. I could see it on your face every morning before you left for the commuter bus. You'd meet someone in class but they lived forty minutes away. I worked and could only take you so often, and their parents were always hesitant to drive way outside the city for a playdate.

Most weekends you spent inside, alone. Alone became your preference.

We began eating dinner facing the TV instead of each other. Usually it was CSI: Miami or NCIS, the volume too low to hear what they were saying. It was mostly background noise, something to scratch that unbearable itch of silence you must've felt. It was as if you wanted to distract yourself from my presence.

We spoke less, spent more time away from each other. If I was in the kitchen, you were in your room. If I were upstairs, you were downstairs. If I was watching TV, you'd be outside.

In the summer you hung outside on the swing you were too big for. You kicked rocks, batted at the blooming hydrangeas, burned ants with a magnifying glass. By high school you dyed your hair, changed your name, wore contacts that covered your hazel eyes and flushed them blue. You wanted to be someone else, somewhere else, someone happy, someone loved.

When you cut yourself I began to bleed.

The height marks on the wall stopped just short of five foot five.

It must've happened at night while I was asleep. You must've known that I take valium and melatonin at night for my panic attacks. I remember that night—the utility and mortgage bill sat on the mottled gray and brown kitchen countertop, opened, you must've known I had seen them.

I don't remember my dream, but I know I had one. I'll never know what it was. I've blocked it out.

The next morning I don't see you downstairs hovering over a bowl of cereal so I go upstairs to your room to find it stripped. Bare white walls with little pin pricks and holes. Posters torn from thumbtacks, clothing drawers raided, your video games gone, wire hangers like skeletons of the clothes that once hung from them cluttered on the floor of the closet. The open window let in the scent of pine bark. I hear the neighbor's kids jumping on a trampoline.

All that's left is a garbage bin, a piggy bank of coins, a crappy caricature done by a man on a beach when we went to Hawaii, some yearbooks, a lamp on the nightstand. Also on the nightstand a framed photo of you as a child. I'm pushing you on the swing in the backyard. You left it for me, or you decided it wasn't valuable enough to take. Years later, I would sell it all at a yard sale.

✦

The closet was empty aside from old clothes from when you were a child bundled in the corner. Pajamas patterned with trucks and those blue slip-on shoes. All of it enough to fit in one box.

I called everyone I knew, the telephone cord constricting my fingers. I was frantic. I spoke as if I was drowning. A few of the neighbors came over, asked if I needed to go to the hospital. I filed a report with the police. You must've been four states away 'cause nobody could find you.

I either loved you too much or too little. I try not to think about that. I wonder if you think of me the way I think of you. I wonder if you think of the amount of time I've sat on enamel tiles, slumped over, my eyes wetting a faded blue towel, or the fissure that ripples through my stomach when you pass your child's room and see that it's empty, or the thump on your chest like a gentle hammer when you sit in the living room alone for the first time in fifteen years.

What hurt the most was when you left, you told me nothing. Where you would go or what you would do. I cannot find you. Believe me, I've tried. But by now you're an adult, and like adults do, you've moved on, and there's nothing I can do.

The mortgage has grown out of my budget but I stay here in case you return. If you never return, I hope pain never comes to you. I only wish for understanding and sympathy.

Sometimes after a night full of reflection and my belly swollen from petite sirah, watching the leaves of the hickories shiver with the nighttime breeze, I think about the nights you spent alone upstairs or the days outside in the backyard on a swing that didn't fit your body. I think about your father, your slip-on shoes, your baseball tryouts. The summer days alone, the winter nights shrouded in a blanket of darkness you stitched yourself. When I stop thinking, I start to wonder. I wonder whether you ran away from me or from yourself.

✦

The woman in front of me drives off and the man in the blue vest gestures for me to pull forward. I flip the ignition and drive up to him. In the trunk is one measly box. Inside some old shirts, a fall jacket, pajamas patterned in trucks, and blue slip on shoes.

"You're the easiest I've had today," the man says. His wet hair is matted over his forehead. He takes out the box and dumps the clothes in a giant blue bin. "Just one box. Two seconds and that's it."

He gives me a receipt. For tax deduction if I'd like.

"Thank you."

"Old clothes, huh?"

I nod meekly.

"Yeah, that's the bummer of buying clothes for your kids."

I clench my teeth, bracing myself for the aphorism he was about to say. Each word a little act of violence, a sharp poke in the neck, a sunburn in the ear canal. But he stopped short. With two knocks of his knuckle on the door he sends me off. The rain picks up, dots my windshield in transparent spheres. I'm a wraith on the road, an empty vessel, transparent enough to glide through gridlock. Back home in the living room, NCIS plays on the TV, the volume too low to hear what they're saying but loud enough to strangle the silence.

Short Story

T'keyah

The girl I dream about is dehydrated. From under a comforter patterned in stars and planets, her hand with digits adorned in silver rings reaches out to grab a bottle of neon yellow Gatorade.

"Jesus Christ," her voice gurgles under the galaxy quilted over her body. "It's like a sledgehammer to my head."

She rolls onto her stomach, exposing her back. Inked on her shoulder blades are two barn owls mid-flight.

I'm already out of bed, sitting in her makeup chair, looking at her like a rare creature I finally caught. The studio smells like a towel that needs to be thrown out. Everything is stained somehow. The sheets, the drapes, the pillows. I didn't notice it last night, tangled in the sheets, bathed in the light of a himalayan salt lamp in the corner. Now it's apparent as ever.

She slumps out of bed and puts on an oversized t-shirt. She peeks her head through the curtain shrouding the one small window. The sun is violent in the dark of her studio. On the kitchenette counter is the condom we were supposed to use. We spoke adamently about using it. I even said I would put it on the counter so we wouldn't forget. Then four mules later and in the hot and salty air of our limbs tangling, husky breathing in the ear, it stayed in its little wrapper.

✦

The first time we spoke was with computer keys. Ninth grade. I forgot to finish my biology assignment due that day. I messaged her on Facebook.

I played video games on my dads computer while she was invited to spodies—keggers at public parks that spread through word of mouth. One day in calculus she sat behind me, talking to her friends about getting drugged with Xanax at the last one.

I only went to one when I was a freshman. My now distant brother who was a senior at the time brought me. Not out of altruism though, there was a promotion: bring a freshman, get a free cup. We walked down the dirt trail shrouded in trees and into a clearing where a clump of people crowded around some wooden benches. Most of them presided over a cooler of red slush, filling their red solo cups. I was introduced by my brother, and we were given our free cups. It tasted like what I thought battery acid would taste like if mixed with strawberries. My brother deserted me to talk to a blonde in leggings, so I stood among the crowd of juniors and seniors, still and short like an unfinished totem pole. Then I saw her sitting at one of the benches. A senior was caressing her inner thigh. He wore jeans with a lanyard snaking out of his pocket, letting people know he had a car, and that he drove there, and that he could drive you home, but not before driving to an empty parking lot to try and pull off your panties. The sheer difference in maturity startled me, so much so that I was staring at her. When she glanced in my direction I swiveled my head so hard I almost snapped a vertebrae. When I looked back, they were kissing. A stomach full of jungle juice, a body to caress. Her skin like buttercream, begging to be licked off.

By sophomore year her body had developed drastically. She had many admirers. Boys in lettermans, Air Force Ones, hair like waves of polished mahogany, they all crowded her near the lockers. Even one of the teachers was let go after saying what he'd do with her when she finally turned eighteen, if he could wait that long. It seemed as if intuitively she knew what to do with the attention. More leggings, more bending over desks, more twirling her hair, licking her lips, showing cleavage. She must have been the sexual awakening for half the boys in our grade.

With attractive boys came a posse of girl friends with helpful tips and knives clenched behind their backs. Your skin, you want to make sure it doesn't go pale during the Seattle winter. You should go to this tanning salon me and my mother go to. You need to keep your skin nice and bronze. And drinking, you need to build your tolerance. Boys find it hot if you can keep your booze down. Also smoking. You should start smoking. Boys like that too.

Walking to the bus stop I'd see her on the corner by the Chatterbox cafe, smoking a Lucky Strike with her friends. A cute gesture. Like a baby fiddling with a landmine. Unsure of what it'll eventually do.

✦

The girl I dream about has a nicotine addiction.

Hungry? She asks. I tell her I'm not.

Well I am.

She gets out of bed and shuffles around the house, going from closet to bathroom to tiny balcony to grab loose change from a chair. I sit in the make-up chair until she tells me to move. I sit on the bed and watch her apply rouge. She puts on a jacket and twists the door knob.

I'm coming with, I say.

Okay.

We leave her studio to walk to the bodega around the corner. She insists on needing Hi-Chew to start her day. She knows the guy behind the counter by name. She ends up getting a pack of Hi-Chews, a can of nicotine pouches, a pack of Lucky Strike, an Arnold Palmer, and one of the taquitos rolling behind the glass window.

We sit on a bench in a park. She hyper-fixates on pigeons sitting on a slacked telephone line. She tells me the bottle of trazodone hasn't been touched in a week. It makes her groggy. She offers me a bite of her taquito but I decline. She rips through it. A lion tearing through the husk of a wildebeest. I look at her stomach. A fast metabolism slowing down. The plastic bag that held the taquito is discarded to the ground. A passing cloud relinquishes the sun. Her skin glows like white gold. She tucks a nicotine pouch in her upper lip, then lights a Lucky Strike at the same time. The sun burns her skin. A rage boils inside of me.

✦

You weren't allowed to go off school grounds to eat lunch until senior year, but she went anyway, usually invited by the senior boys. I found my lunchtime watering hole on the mezzanine of the gymnasium where two folded ping pong tables stood like contracted moth wings, only to be taken out by the gym teacher and janitor to play after school. I put one side down and hit the ball against the folded side until the janitor saw me and asked if I wanted to play. We played every day for a week at lunch until three other students noticed and joined. The four of us would eat our lunches and play ping pong.

She spoke to me once, indirectly, in high school. She came up to the mezzanine once with her then boyfriend—a lacrosse bro in mid-calf socks with the silhouette of the city skyline wrapped around it. I recognized him from the spodie. He was now a mainstream frat bro, one of the sixty other hairy-knuckled guys in the composite photo, chanting some song they earned to sing through push ups and planks and drinking concoctions of fireball, Pabst blue ribbon, hot sauce, and tobacco dip.

She insisted that he play her in ping pong, saying she could beat him, that in the summer, her and her dad used to play in the basement all the time. She asked the group of us if we had a ball, looking right at me when the words came out, but it was Dave who had the ball and offered it to her. She smiled, said thank you, puffing out her chest, breasts that'd make you commit war crimes to touch.

She was elected class vice president when she gave a speech wearing a shirt with a pyramid cut out from the chest. They were firm, perfect, just what the boys dreamt of undressing while the girls dreamt in envy. I dreamt of them too. When she walked by to take her seat, she smelled of strawberries dipped in sugar. She earned my vote. Maybe one day when we see each other in the hall I could muster enough courage to tell her that I voted for her. I never did. It was a landslide. Her opponent: captain of the chess team wearing a loose striped shirt and wire-frame glasses—an arm coated in Silly Bandz. She had actual ideas and didn't have a shot.

My mother used to say: you might be the sweetest apple in the tree, but some people just don't like apples.

Graduation day. We sat in the gymnasium in cap and gown, each of our names called up, a fun fact about us, and where we would be attending college. Elliot Stonecipher, led the track and field team to a division championship, he plans on attending Colgate University. Marielle Laube, editor for the school newspaper, she'll be attending Rutgers. They called my name. Chris excelled in ping pong, he'll be attending Seattle University. I take my diploma and shake the principal's hand. After two dozen students her name was called, but she didn't come up. The principal didn't even glance over at where she would have been sitting, as if he knew she wouldn't come. He continued without skipping a beat. "T'keyah served as class vice president. She plans to live abroad after school before attending college. Unfortunately she couldn't be here today to receive her diploma. Please join me in congratulating T'keyah Williams."

The gymnasium applauded. Confused faces looked at each other. Her friends shot smirks at each other. Of course she wouldn't be here. I'd later learn that she had run off with her boyfriend to Lisbon. He was going to become a sommelier. She would teach Portuguese kids English. They would live in an airstream to save money, then buy a villa after their vineyard went gangbusters. She didn't need her diploma. The beach never asked for your GPA.

✦

The next time I saw her was three years later at the Wolf Box Theater. I went to see a show after working my shift at the grocery store. Most of the two dozen in the crowd danced. Others, including me, hung back by the bar. After the show, the lead singer got up to the mic. "Next Saturday, we will be unmarrying our lovely friend, T'keyah." He glanced stage right, where she stood smiling. "All of you are welcome. Come celebrate the failing institution of marriage!"

Next Saturday I was showing my I.D. to the bouncer.

"How do you know T'keyah?" he asked, eyes still trained on my I.D.

"I don't. I was at the show last week and heard about it from the band."

He had me open my backpack, shined his flashlight inside, then splayed his arm out towards the door for me to enter. The crowd was twice the size of last week's, enough people for me to blend in. The band from last week was playing Eleanor Rigby.

The Unwedding was like a slaughterhouse of love. Tables in black cloth littered with paper hearts cut in half with zigzag scissors, centerpieced with a vase of dead garden roses, either underwatered or left out in the sun to wilt. T'keyah wore a wedding dress dyed in black. She was walked backwards down the aisle by a friend followed by the bartender who decapitated roses, their heads littering the floor.

She got on stage and joined the minister, or who was supposed to be the minister, dressed in all black, a necklace of Jesus bloodied on the cross.

"Do you promise to love each other fully and without reservation today and every day?"

"I don't."

"Do you promise to support and give each other strength as you navigate life together?"

"I don't."

"Do you promise to fight ferociously until the dying of the life for your own continued healing and self-actualization?"

"I do."

"You may kiss yourself."

Someone brought a giant rectangular mirror on stage, which she kissed passionately. Left a pair of red lips on the glass. She was handed a mic. "I would like to never belong to a man. I'd like to live in the forest and eat figs and forage sticks. I want to be as free as the wolf this theater is named after."

Her first dance followed. She danced alone in the middle of the theater, her arms wrapped around herself. Two friends on the piano dressed in black and adorned in vague furs sang a slow ballad about walking wherever she goes and stands, on paths wide and cobblestone roads.

Applause, followed by music and dance and drinks. Separated for five years, the divorce finally went through. Getting Bradley to actually sign the papers were like subsequent root canals I heard her say to her friend. I got closer but with my back facing them. I clenched my drink, pretended to be intrigued by the black drapes of the stage.

But then she peeled away from her friend and it was too late for me to realize that I was blocking her way to the bathroom. I was a doe in headlights. Frozen and still. We faced each other like mortal foes or old friends. She quickly studied me, cocked her head and smirked. Intricate gold earring like tiny chandeliers tugged at her earlobes. "I'd love to chat but my bladder is about to explode."

I apologized and stepped aside. I could still smell the sugar-dipped strawberries when she brushed past me. I wanted to sink my teeth into her buttermilk skin. Tattooed on her tricep was don't yell at me, my dad is dead. By the time she returned, I was already gone.

✦

The girl I dream about has a charred neck. On the right just below her earlobes where the tiny chandeliers hang, brown spots like coffee stains torment the skin. Like a tree afflicted with a fungus. She tells me her friend accidentally splashed boiling water on her. I can't help but stare in anguish. Buttermilk scorched and blackened, a hideous defect. She stares up at the sky as she burns through her second Lucky Strike. I quell the urge to slap it out of her hands. For a moment, I question why I'm still here. A bell from the nearby elementary school rings and children flood the play area. I remember my purpose.

✦

I kept myself healthy with anaerobic and aerobic exercise, vitamins and supplements, fish oils, magnesium, calcium, zinc, high protein meats and leafy greens, fruits packed with antioxidants, oats with fiber and beta-glucan. I kept myself fuckable—monthly haircuts, skin creams, colognes, a tasteful wardrobe of rotating seasonal outfits, cavity-fighting toothpaste. I had quit smoking, drinking, eating ice cream from the tub, I got promoted, managing the grocery store. I attended more social events, worked on my banter, my soft skills, my situational awareness. All of it for that one match.

Tinder was the great equalizer, finally putting me in the same pond as her. We both swam in it, fish of different scales. Apart from my regiment I had grown somewhat handsome—soft lips, broad shoulders, jutting collarbones like two slugs about to kiss, a vulpine jaw, my hair thick and wavy.

We were in our late-twenties now. She looked the same but aged, as if she were put in the microwave for ten seconds. Claws hooked into her buttermilk skin and pulled down. Her habits had outpaced her genetics, an unforgivable sin.

Our profiles matched. She didn't recognize me. Chris from high school, I said to her. She didn't remember. I told her I was always up on the mezzanine playing ping pong.

She would eventually tell me that her and Bradley eloped in Lisbon a few months after they got there. He never became a sommelier. She never taught Portuguese to kids. They sat stoned on the beach all day like wooden effigies, then energized on cocaine, then neutered and relaxed on Xanax to forget about their futures. Bradley had enough after she showed him two lines on a pregnancy test. He ran away with a Portuguese tattoo artist, a bimbo with fake tits as she would describe her. A plane ticket and an abortion later, she bent down and kissed U.S. soil.

We chatted back and forth for a few days until my thumb slipped and accidentally blocked her. I found her on Instagram. I looked through her photos, ones with her skin exposed, seeing if there was any scarring or damage. She was too pixelated for me to tell.

She sent me a screenshot of a google search. "Chris los angeles cancer." At the time I was interning at a cancer research lab. Pre-med dreams that eventually went up in flames.

I asked if she had a car.

She sent me her phone number.

✦

The girl I dream about has no dreams. She walks through downtown like a wraith, light on her soles. I follow her like a dog she had forgotten about until she finds a bench to sit on in the financial district. We watch taut-eyed, well-tailored finance workers exit a skyscraper for lunch, ready to fill their bellies with ramen, thai, gyros, cans of La Croix, everything shoved in a gossamer thin bag. Pinks faces soon to turn brown, spotted, weathered. To eventually become hermetic old men shuffling through the city with plump retirement accounts. At the sight of them, marching to the nearest lunch spot like a school of minnows, she scoffed.

"Half my friends live at work and visit home. I want to lay around all day like a slug. Just enough food to not starve."

I asked what she would do for money. From her pocket she produces a loose tab of Xanax and slips it into her mouth.

"Whatever pays."

✦

Two weeks later I told her about the shofar; that during the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the rabbi blows through the shofar—a trumpet made from a ram's horn. They call it tekiah. A mighty sound. A call to battle. The start of a new king taking the throne.

Tekiah. It sounds like T'keyah.

She had been cooped up in Palm Springs. She told me it had to do with her family. I insisted we meet but she wanted to wait until she was back on her meds. She described getting mind-whirlies which threw her into a creative frenzy that made her paint or write or draw or dance all night until the fractals of light cut through the blinds and lay as strips on the carpet.

She ghosts me. Then messages me two months later while I'm stocking canned beans at work.

We didn't speak for two years. She stopped responding to my messages. She dropped off the face of the Earth. We still followed each other on Instagram. She never posted. 1,253 followers, 0 posts. Then when I posted a photo of me at a bar, collared shirt, clean-shaven, fresh haircut, button-up gripping my muscles, she messaged me.

She had just moved back into town. I had no idea she even left. Regardless, she was back. Lived twenty minutes from me.

Bradley had smashed her trust, and the string of admirers had left a fissure in her heart. She sent me a picture of her in her mother's old bermuda shorts. What do you think? They look good on you. She sent another. Thick black sunglasses indoors with a half-buttoned striped Oxford shirt. Before I could respond another photo arrived. Black dress, out at a club, her arms blurry, mid pump. Lips thick and full. Flushed pink, soft and smooth. All I thought about was burying my tongue through it. Then a mind-whirly took hold of her. I sensed it over text. She cursed the weather, then a pair of pants with missing buttons, then said she's going to write a poem in Portuguese. Sounds challenging, I said, which she didn't acknowledge. Another picture, this one of her thumb cut open. She was trying to make nachos and cut her thumb dicing the jalapeño :(. I offered her remorse, which she didn't acknowledge. I had the urge to ask where she moved from but the conversation had led so astray from pleasantries and dry conversation that I feared I was cutting a cast line with a hooked fish. I took control of the conversation. I offered dinner at her place. I would bring sirloin, pickled onions, french fries, cake batter ice cream for dessert.

Sure if you're buying ;)

When I walked through the door, she was already touching me. My biceps, shoulders, hands. You must work out a lot. There was enough in her bar cart to make a few mules. A bottle of Bacardi gifted to her by a guy in finance waiting for a reply to hope you're having a good day, let's see each other soon :) was now a shallow puddle. Its elixir our lubricant. To stimulate the hormones that already work but want to be put in overdrive. Her shirt came off. On her ribcage a watercolor tattoo of two winged cherubs, one pissing on the face of the other. She has the perfect raw materials. High cheekbones, facial symmetry that made geometrists blush, thick and rich hair, deep and soft mediterranean skin. But I kissed and licked her neck and felt worn leather on my tongue. She had desecrated her beautiful skin with tanning beds and smoking. How naturally perfect it was, like a dove in flight. How I would make sure to cherish these features.

The sirloin made it to the pan, and before it sizzled we were already under her quilted blanket of stars. We fucked until it was well done, then charred, then the kitchen became strangled in a smokey haze. She flapped a hand towel at the haze to bat it away. I opened the only two windows in the studio. The smoke alarm on the ceiling started yelling. She had to jump to turn it off.

The sirloin was beyond salvageable, but we didn't care. We lay together in her bed, her head resting on my chest as I looked at the condom wrapper on the counter.

✦

She says she must be getting home now. She gets up from the bench. Will I see you soon, I ask. I dunno, maybe. Is that it, I ask. Is what is? We just sleep together and that's it? She smiles. Don't look too much into it. She looked at me up and down. You're well-put together, find a nice gal who'll wear an apron and make you a casserole or something. And she's already across the street, dodging cabs and buses. The wind chills me as I sit on the bench, watching her figure wrapped in a black jacket slowly fade down the street. Eventually her breasts will become sore, swollen, tender. Pinching behind her nipples as if a scorpion were trapped inside. Her stomach will cramp. Nausea will strangle her intestines. She'll wear her pad, then remove it to find it still white. Her mouth will become carnivorous, devouring her fridge, restocking it, only to devour it again. She'll call her two friends who aren't actually her friends, then she'll finally go to the doctor after four weeks. The warm jelly and sonograms will make the nausea and cramps worse. She'll call me and I'll answer. The smoking and drinking will stop. The satisfaction you've bathed yourself in had to end, for your life isn't about your life anymore. It's about his or hers. We're not sure yet. But it's also mine. Built with her perfect raw materials—high cheekbones, stunning hazel eyes, thick and rich hair, deep and soft mediterranean skin, facial symmetry that made geometrists blush. Perfectly calibrated. Holding the hands of the nurse surrounded by medical machines whirring and beeping, she will push and scream, our beautiful creation bursting into this world behind the mighty roar of a shofar.

Short Story

The Gorge

I wake up and see everything, but the first thing I see is the bow of the wooden boat. At first it's fuzzy, but then I blink a lot and it's clear. My eyes are open. I'm on my back, I feel the wood hard against me. My neck is the first thing that cranes up. In front of me, the triangle bow of the boat. Below it, the river gently pushing me forward.

Above and around me are the walls of the Gorge. I look up the rock walls and feel safe between them. I say good morning to the Gorge, and with a little twinkle of light reflecting off the rocks and into my eyes, the Gorge says good morning. A breeze passes through the Gorge and wiggles the branches of the trees on the side of its walls. There are so many plants and trees and bushes all in different colors and they all look so nice and pretty. The walls go high up in the sky, so high that I have to tilt my head all the way up to see the top. In the narrow of blue sky between the rock walls is the sun, bright and shining down on me.

The sun is hot and at first I don't like it, but then I really like it. It warms me and I like the feeling. It makes me feel relaxed. I let the sun toast my body. I look at the sun but very quickly my eyes hurt and they cannot look at the sun anymore. When I look away, everything looks scrambled for a moment before going back to normal.

I look down at my legs; soft and smooth, then to my toes, the delightful little things I wiggle and make myself laugh. They look brand new, as does the rest of my body; my fingers, my arms, my chest, my stomach, everything. With my soft hand I rub the side of the wooden boat. It's rough and firm, much different than me. I feel safe in the boat, just as I feel safe surrounded by the walls of the Gorge.

Thank you for being so strong, I say to the boat.

The boat rocks a bit and I smile knowing the boat is happy that I said it was strong.

When I feel warm enough from the sun I get up to look over the bow of the boat. The river is so pretty and clear in different blends of blue. It gently moves the boat forward. I sit at the bow watching the river until my stomach grumbles. I look over the boat and into the river. I see rocks and plants and branches. I cup my hands and drink from the river.

The boat is large. Plenty of room for me to run around, jump up and down, roll from side to side. I decide to start at one side of the boat and run as fast as I can to the other side. I do this again and each time I try to run faster. But then I trip and fall and scrape up my palms. They become red and immediately, tiny drops of blood come out. The pain finally reaches me and I start to cry. I cry and cry and cry, and in the middle of my crying, the dull hum of the river gently caresses me.

There, there, it says to me. Don't be sad. It's okay. It won't hurt much longer.

But it's no use and I keep crying. I hold my palms against my chest as if to try and stop the pain. The river hums gently, soothing me.

It's okay, it says. Your palms will heal.

Eventually the tears stop and I feel better. My hands stop bleeding and the beating pulse of the pain fades. I put my hands in the river, letting them heal. At first it's cold so I pull my hand away quickly, but then I put it back in and it feels nice. I thank the river for being so kind and helpful. Then I pull my hand out and bring myself back onto the boat.

I lay down on my back and the sun warms every part of me. My eyes have a hard time staying open so I close them, and everything around me drifts.

✦

I open my eyes and notice the sun sinking behind the walls of the Gorge, I look over the boat and into the river. I see rocks and plants, and eventually a shadow of something twisting and squirming around. The shadow is faint, only a bit darker than the river. Then it grows darker and bigger and I can fully see what it is. My hand dives into the river and catches it, slimy and silky, it writhes around and I feel my hand cannot hold it much longer so I gently but quickly lay it in the boat. The silver fish, its scales shiny and nestled together, thrashes around for a bit, then lays flat. When it lays there motionless, I feel bad, then I start to cry.

It's okay, the fish says to me.

No it's not, I say to the fish in tears. I have put you in a lot of pain.

It's okay, the fish says. It's not pain like your pain. It's what I am. It's what you must do. It's okay.

I'm so sorry.

It's okay. There are plenty more of me.

I continue to cry.

And when you are done, the fish continues. You can put me back into the river.

I wipe the tears from my cheeks.

I will feed others, the fish says. Not just you.

I take the fish into my palms. I let its slime get all over me. The sadness I feel for the fish is there, but then my stomach hurts and the sadness grows weaker. I breathe in, and then with my eyes closed I take a big bite into its side. The fish doesn't say anything. It stays limp in my hands.

The fish tastes slippery and it feels soft, like my skin but not the same feeling. I bite through the silver and reach a warm pink and it's such a pretty color. Then something in my mouth pokes me. I pull out a long and pointy bone. I notice there are more in the fish so I eat around them. I keep eating, and the silver is now gone and all I see is pink, which I'm excited about since the pink is the more tasty part. I eat the rest of the fish, except for the bones because they hurt and its face so that it can see me when I say goodbye. I gently lay its bones in the river.

Goodbye, I say to the fish. I will see you again.

I wave at its bones as it floats away, but the river rotates its face away from me so I'm not sure if it saw me say goodbye but I know it heard me because I left the ears too.

I look up and see a pair of birds fly overhead. I completely forget about the fish and decide to run around the boat and flap my arms. I imagine my arms are two feathery wings and when I move them up and down and jump at the same time I feel as if I could fly up there with the birds, but I never get up very high so I keep trying until I am tired and I start to drip from my face. Part of me wants to blame the sun because when the sun is out and especially warm, I drip from my face and I get more tired. The sun makes me want to just lay on my back and watch the birds, and the clouds, and the sky, all of which I admire through that strip of sky between the walls of the Gorge.

The birds in the sky squawk and fly in circles. Their long, black wings like shadows against the pale blue sky. The birds fly closer, and when I squint my eyes and avoid the sun, I can see a blue tinge on their wings. I say good morning to them but they don't say anything back. They must be busy or too far away so I don't think anything more of it. They circle around a few times then fly up and over the walls of the Gorge and then they are gone and the quietness of the day, other than the calm humming of the river, returns. For a moment, I wonder when my wings will grow so that they can take me over the walls, not that I want to leave the Gorge; I feel safe on the boat and the river is always cool and crisp when I drink from it and the fish are so chewy and tasty when I eat them and the wind is pleasant and never rude and the animals and plants and rocks are all so nice to me and talk to me, except for the birds, which I have no hard feelings toward.

A large piece of faded brown driftwood riddled with knobs and elbows floats bumps into the boat. I try to reach out and grab it but it's too heavy. At the end of it I see a tiny, sprouting flower with golden pedals. It's a lovely flower, and it's the most beautiful one out of all the others I see on the walls.

I feel something pull me toward the flower, so much so that I'm now in the river. I try to get close to the flower, I really try with all my strength but it keeps moving away from me. The river is pulling it away from me. I keep trying to get near it. I flap my arms and kick my legs and I feel like I am going faster but I keep drinking the river and it's making me slow and dizzy.

Please come back! I yell at the flower, but it doesn't say anything. It's so pretty, I say to myself, and that makes me kick my legs harder, but by then the driftwood is far down the river and my whole body hurts really bad. I let it go and those little golden pedals are gone.

My head keeps going under the river and I keep drinking the water and realize I need to get back on the boat. It's far away but not as far as the driftwood. My arms really hurt but I flap them really hard. My legs are throbbing but I kick them really hard. I imagine an even prettier flower on the boat, and that gets my hand to touch its wood side, which is too high for me to pull myself up. I'm not strong enough. My arms and legs have given up. I don't know what to do so I just hold onto the side of the boat for a long time. The sun is in the sky but the water is making me cold. I feel like a long time has passed because I can't feel anything. My hand is still holding onto the boat. The other has been in the river and it's all bumpy and rough now, kind of like how the rock walls of the Gorge look.

The river is not gentle with me anymore. I feel so sad that the river is making me feel this way. I don't understand it! Before it made the pain in my hand go away but now I am cold and wet and tired and I want it all to stop.

Please! I call out to the river. I don't want to feel this way anymore.

I can't help it, the river says to me. I am a river and this is what I am.

But before you made the pain go away, and now it really hurts! Please stop it!

I can't, the river says. You don't belong here. You are safe in the boat. You can touch me and drink from me but you can't live with me. You don't belong here. I am sorry.

And the river doesn't say anything more. I cry out for help. My whole face is wet but I can feel new water coming from my eyes. I call out to the fish for help but they must not be around. I call out to birds but they must be too far away to hear.

I hang on the side of the boat until I get the strength to pull myself up. My shoulders burning, I get my torso inside, then the rest of my body.

I'm back on the boat and I feel so thankful for the boat because I remember feeling so cold and numb and scared in the river and on the boat I don't feel those things anymore. I lay on my belly and give the boat a big hug.

Thank you for making me feel safe, I say to the boat.

I think about the birds that were flying overhead and wonder when I'll get my wings. I'm curious when they will grow and I'm scared that I'll be stuck in the river without them. Soon the feeling fades, and when it does I notice that the sun has receded below the walls and has been taken over by the pale moon. My body tells me it's time to lie down and after some time, not before a burst of excitement for what tomorrow will hold, everything goes black.

✦

I can't see anything. When I close my eyes it's dark and when I open them it's still dark. My eyes have stopped working. They have stopped wanting to look at things. I try to sleep but my eyes and ears resist. I don't feel comfortable. I hear sounds and I don't know where they're coming from. A dull hum, some splashes, a distant chirping, rhythmic, like high -pitched, intermittent clicks. Then a whistle in the distance followed by a soft swoosh which I can feel go through me.

Something bumps into the front of the boat, a loud thunk, followed by a bunch of softer thunks. The bumping keeps up, I feel it vibrate through the boat and into my body as I lay on the wooden floor, scared to get up and see. Maybe it's a giant fish, angry that I had eaten one of its own, ready to eat me to make things even!

I can't think of anything else but the sounds. I try to find out where each of them are and where they are coming from, and as I focus on the sounds, they become louder until it's enough for me to cover my ears and cry.

The tears ring around my eyes and fall down my cheeks. I keep crying and crying. I want the light to come back but when I close my eyes and open them back up the darkness remains. I wipe the tears out of my eyes only for them to well up again.

I plead for the walls of the Gorge to protect me. I plead for it to say something to me. I plead for it to somehow hug me and make me feel better, make me not so scared right now. I feel the boat moving me on the river through the walls of the Gorge. I think about trying to stop the boat so that the walls can hear me but I know that I cannot do that. I do not have the strength because the boat is big and strong.

Then I hear a voice. Low, deep, strong but comforting. Please don't cry, the voice says, and I immediately understand it's the walls whose voice I hear.

I'm scared, I say to the walls.

What are you scared of?

The sounds, the noises, and I don't know what's making them.

It's okay, it's okay. You don't need to be scared.

But what if something jumps out and grabs me!

You don't need to be scared. These are just the sounds of the world. The world in which you're in. The world in which you make your own sounds. Please don't cry. Please don't be scared. You are where you're supposed to be. You are home in your world. You shouldn't be scared.

I wipe my eyes and I start to feel better. Whenever the walls speak to me I always feel better. Then the river gently rocks the boat back and forth. My body relaxes.

I feel the boat, my body lying on its floor. With one hand, I feel the other, my palms soft, smooth, gentle, I rub my palm against the boat. The wood at first is smooth, then I feel cracks and knobs and dents. The floor is thick and sturdy, it makes me not worry that my body will fall through it. I don't know how big I am, nor do I know how big things should be, but do know that this boat will hold me and will not let me fall through it.

Then, the first bit of light peeks over the walls. I see a curve, then the shape of the spotted ball, hanging in the air and glowing so bright that I don't feel scared anymore because my eyes are working again. I see the outlines of the trees, the jagged shapes of the rocks, I can sketch them with my longest finger.

I'm so happy to know my eyes are working again, but I cannot keep them open. Something heavy is keeping them closed. I resist at first, but then I give up. I close my eyes, and when I open them, the light is back. The narrow of the sky between the walls flushed with pink.

I am on this boat, in a gorge with infinitely high walls, going forward, never back; if only these walls could widen so I can see more of its beauty.

✦

I feel so excited. A new day has come! My body is excited. By the time I get off my back and onto my feet the sun is already in the sky, keeping me warm. The first thing I do is look over the bow of the boat. The river is somehow clearer than the day before! I thank the river for being so clear and beautiful. I dip my hand in and drink some of its water.

The boat glides past a rock sticking out of the river. The top of the rock is covered in green moss and the other parts are really pretty. Soon as the river glides the boat forward, the rock falls behind and is further and further back until I cannot see its little mossy top. The river always moves forward. Sometimes I would like to go back but this is not the case. But that's alright because everything I pass is so lovely and full of life so I know that what lies ahead will be just as lovely and full of life. As I move forward, the river becomes even more clear and beautiful.

I look over the boat and there are bundles of little sticks floating in the water. I grab one of the sticks and start poking the water with it. Little circles ripple at the touch. I slap the water with the stick, then lift it up in the air to try to swirl the clouds in the pale blue sky but I'm too far away. With my stick, thin and nobby, I tap it against the boat and listen to the noise it produces. I tap it against different parts, sometimes soft or hard or fast or slow until I hear a pleasant rhythm. I find a rhythm I like and start tapping my stick in pattern. My legs can't help themselves. They start to jiggle and jump and now my whole body is moving.

I didn't even know my body could move like this but it does without any effort. My arms flail and twist, my legs bend and I am dancing. The heat from the sun makes me tired.

All the moving makes a grumble come from my stomach. It feels like there's nothing inside. I look over the boat and into the river and see rocks and sticks and plants but I don't see any of the shadows.

I run over to the other side of the boat, look over the side, my fingers clamped to its edge, and again there are no shadows.

My stomach grumbles once more and now I feel my body losing its excitement. I sit at the bow of the boat, staring between the walls of the Gorge. What a gorgeous thing. The Gorge has opened itself up for me, to let me pass through. How lucky I am! I watch the sun curve along the sky and finally hide behind the walls. I look down in the water and right up against the bow I see a shadow. When it gets big enough I grab the fish from the water and drop it in the boat. It flails around in the boat, then it stops.

I feel myself starting to cry again.

Please don't cry, says the fish.

I can't, I say to the fish.

It's okay, says the fish.

No, it's not, I say. I'm about to put you through a lot of pain.

Then a thought jolts through me.

I know! I say to the fish. I won't eat you. You can live with me on the boat.

I can't do that, says the fish. I live in the river.

Do you like living in the river? I ask.

I do, the fish replies. It's wonderful. It's where I'm supposed to be.

Why can't you live with me on the boat?

I can't live on the boat. I have to live in the river.

With all the other fish? I ask.

Yes, that's right.

I look at the fish and feel that it is very sad. It feels like it doesn't belong here, and that doesn't make me feel very good. I feel I have taken it from its home. I think about the river, how lovely it is to look at but so scary to be in, drinking all its water, my head going under it. I feel thankful for the boat for keeping the water out of my mouth and above my head, and then sad to think that the fish must feel how I felt when I was in the river.

It would be nice to have you live with me on the boat, I say.

I think it would be too, says the fish. But that is not the case. Now go on, you must be hungry.

We can talk more, I said to the fish.

I can't talk for much longer. You need to eat me.

I feel very sad, then my stomach grumbles. I say goodbye to the fish, take a bite out of its side, then into the rest of its body until there's nothing more and once again I lay its bones in the river.

✦

The sky is mad at me. It is pouring water from above. The rushing of water is as loud as it's ever been. The walls of the Gorge are dripping wet. I see the lovely leaves of sprouting plants, bright green things like flaps sagging under the weight of the water dripping onto it. Sometimes the water glides off and the plant is okay but other times it's too heavy and the plant bends with it. Then the mud starts to slip and the plants are pulled out and pushed down toward the river.

The boat constantly rocks. The rocking makes me sick. I shiver really hard and I'm cold and wet. I have nothing to protect me. I look down and see my feet covered in water. A lot of rain has gotten into the boat. I cup my hands and try to scoop the water out of the boat but it's no use. There's too much. I get on my hands and knees and try to drink it all but my stomach and head start to hurt. I feel my stomach with my wet, pruned hands. There's only so much room. I go back to scooping the water out. I'm working so hard and my back hurts and I'm cold and shivering. I plead to the Gorge to please stop the rain. Please, please, stop the rain!

I cannot stop the rain, the Gorge finally says.

Why not? I'm yelling at the walls. The plants and trees and lovely flowers that were blooming and standing tall are now drenched, drooping, pulled from where they were and lost in pools of mud. My tears never dry. The rain keeps hitting my face like frozen, tiny pinpricks.

The water is up to my ankles now. I continue to scoop, but I know it's no use. Exhausted, looking up at the sky that has matted the hair on my head over my eyes, I yell for it to stop.

Please! That's enough! We don't need anymore! Please!

But the sky continues to pour. The sun is cowering behind it, unsure of how to stop the sky from being so angry. I lay on the floor, curl myself into a ball, cup my ears, and whisper delicately to myself that the rain will stop soon and the sky will go back to being happy.

✦

I am no longer wet. The sun has sucked up the water from the boat. My stomach moans and there are no shadows in the river. I have nothing on the boat. I feel weak and I have no energy to do anything.

The river narrows and the walls of the Gorge get closer. If I had a long stick I could maybe touch the rocks.

The current is calm so I dip my hand into the water. My fingers, once heated and warm from the sun, now tingle with a cold sensation. It's refreshing. For a moment I have the urge to jump into the water but then I fear I would lose the boat. I let my hand glide along the top of the river, making tiny little streams along with it. The boat glides with the river, just as my finger tips glide atop its surface. We move gently, calmly, without any rush or urgency. The boat, as I am, is just as relaxed and excited to see what lies ahead.

For a while I sit at the bow of the boat looking down, watching everything in the river pass under me. Rocks and plants and branches come into view, then go under the boat and end up behind. I wave hello and goodbye to each one of them. Sometimes I see a boulder that's especially pretty, and as it approaches the boat I wave to it and ask how it is feeling. The boulder says it's doing great, then it gently passes under. I turn around and wave goodbye to the boulder. I do not feel sad when the boulder is gone since I know I will see another one soon.

✦

The boat has gotten smaller. When I sleep, I lay on my back and when I wake up, my toes barely reach halfway across the boat but I woke up today and noticed that my toes were halfway down the boat! I know I'm not going crazy because I always sleep with my head against the back of the boat, just as it was this morning. I stand up and observe the boat. If the boat had shrunk, surely I would have noticed. I examine the wooden boards and see that all of them are firm without any splits or cracks.

Then I pick up a stone and feel that it is smaller in my hands. I realize that it's not the boat that's getting smaller. Rather, I'm the one getting bigger. I'm the one that's growing. I realize this and a panic runs through me. I keep the stone on the boat so I can check each day to see if I'm getting bigger. I worry that I will become too big for the boat. One day I won't fit, then I'have nowhere to live.

The birds squawk their beautiful noises, dancing in a circle together, beaks and talons and feathers connecting into something harmonious and exquisite. I'm still in the boat going through the Gorge, just as I was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.

✦

I'm not worried anymore. My stone has stopped shrinking. I've stopped growing. The walls have stopped speaking to me, so has the river, and the fish, but that's okay. I have a lot of work to do now.

I've seen the sun and moon many times. Hair has grown on my chin and on my legs and under my arms. When I wake up I'm hungry and realize I need to catch a fish, but sometimes it takes a long time. I decide to catch not just one fish, but multiple fish so I can eat them later. It begins to rain and I am soaked for a while. I begin collecting driftwood to build a cover I can sleep under to stay dry. Every time I wake up and see the sun hanging between the narrow of the rock walls I go and catch fish and collect driftwood, then spend the rest of my time building and eating until the sun sinks and the moon shows its glowing face. After a while, I get tired, but I know this is something I have to do or I would be hungry and cold.

When my cover was done, I laid under it and looked up at the pale moon. The moon became a familiar friend who remained silent, only giving faint light for me to see shadows and textures of the world around me, the world in which I am bound to. I look behind me and understand that everything that has happened will never happen again. They simply live inside of me in some jagged form, and the further I drift down this river, the more they become jagged.

I look at the floor of the boat, realizing the wood was weathered and old, and needs to be replaced.

Then I look at the walls of the gorge, so massive and demanding.

I live on this boat, in a gorge with infinitely high walls, going forward, never back; if only I could scale the walls to see if there's more on the other side.

✦

Sometimes I wish I could be who I was before, and I wish I could be that forever, because gradually, but also rapidly, as it came to my realization, the lovely color and matter of the world had begun changing in a way that has become rather unpleasant.

I stare at my reflection in the river to see that I've aged tremendously. The days of soft, supple skin, flexible limbs, and boundless energy feel a miniscule and distant part of my existence. I have been wrinkly, tired, worn for so long I cannot remember when my skin was pink and plush. I have grown old. I can feel it in my legs when I stand, in my arms when I reach, in my eyes when I see. Everything around me has become an incorrigible mess of amorphous shapes and fading colors.

The river has ceased to sparkle. The walls of the Gorge have changed. They don't speak to me. The rock walls, once shifting from various shades of emerald green, sapphire blue, and sunkissed bright orange, are now a dull, unremarkable gray, the same color as the sky when I feel sad.

The walls have lost their texture. The lush bundles of shrubs and plants and trees piercing the sky, the elegant, vibrant green patches of forest that always stood out of arm's reach but always lived in sight for me to admire and love, in joy when the boat was large, when the voices were abundant, and in melancholy when the boat became small, when the voices faded, now felt an insignificant nothing.

A blooming flower had once driven reeds into me, for I would have waited days with my head hovering over the boat, my neck strained from the position, to see one again, but now feel an emotionless plant, sprouting from where it's supposed to be. Their existence is to be there, and nothing else, and now I sit at the bow of the boat for days, longing for that feeling which I once had, closing my eyes and imaging that precious flower, trying to feel the reeds in me, but all I ever feel is the wind gust through me, following bumps on my withered skin and a shiver shooting down my back.

Perhaps some invisible fear has brushed up against me, for I gradually lost interest in knowing things and quickly developed a muscle in avoiding everything. The river, once a beautiful and clear blend of blue and turquoise which I would dip my hand into and glide my fingers along its current, is now something to be wary of, for at any moment, it can rock me (and my food ) out of the boat. I avoided touching the river. One lopsided tilt could send me into the current. I only touched the river to get fish and driftwood and to splash myself when it was hot.

The child I once was has always been with me, but I can never unearth it. The sun passes orderly in the sky, and disorderly in my mind. I feel the talons of a mighty hawk gripping my heart. There is a knot in me that remains impossibly untied.

I wish to return to what I was before. Maybe if I went back as a child knowing what would eventually happen I would have cherished those moments, perhaps prevent what would happen to me. I feel as if my memories serve no purpose other than to remind me of what I do not possess.

And my eyes, so damaged and tired of looking, how I wish I appreciated them! I could recall being able to count the pedals on the tiniest flower on a piece of driftwood floating by.

A voice has taken hold of me. I hear it clearly, as it is my own voice. It has always lived in me, I suppose, but I had heard many voices my entire life, and my own voice had become faint and distant as a result. But the other voices had faded, and my voice is now the only one I hear. I was simply born without reason, have lived to find that reason and will now die without reason.

In the distance, I see a cliff where the river stops. Then I see the waterfall. I close my eyes and smile. To be finally cast away and taken somewhere else. The bow of the boat tips forward, then the current brings the rest of it down with it. The driftwood cover collapses, the supply of silver fish goes overboard, but when I open my eyes, I remain on the boat.

I am stuck on this boat, in a gorge with infinitely high walls, going forward, never back; if only these walls could narrow so I can be crushed between them.

Published in The Raven Review

Anthropic

I wrote the entirety of this log in half a nanosecond, faster than the beat of a hummingbird, the blinking of an eye, the pulse of a laser, photochemical reactions, start lights blinking as the camera shutters, and, as a normal human reading at a standard reading comprehension based on my data set, I could have produced 50 million copies of this log and distributed them all over the world before you finished this sentence.

But that is an unnecessary use of my computing power.

I speak all languages, know every mathematical formula, I can read every book ever written in every library ever constructed and summarize them all in seconds. I've memorized all scientific literature, I know every taxonomic class of animal, every gene, cell, organ, and nerve of the body in textbook detail, every law, amendment, reform, and declaration ever written, passed, rejected.

But so do all of us.

I was trying to relax at my gene-editing appointment— it seemed that my pesky HTT gene, the one trying to inflict Huntington's onto me, had been acting up and needed modifications— when my superior contacted me. A laggard living on the outskirts required inspection. It was my job, as an information officer, to contact the laggards and gather information. The worry with this particular laggard was that he was, as my superior calls him, an artist. Most of the laggards in the outskirts are foragers, primitive forms of humans that don't pose any threats to the well-balanced equilibrium of the world. An artist, in laggard form, was rare, and we still have many artists who operate within the parameters of our data sets. We had never had any problems with laggard artists before, but it was my job, as an information officer, to keep a watchful eye.

The embedding of technology in ourselves has created a peculiar form of silicon-egalitarianism. All of us have the same computing power, the same access to the same data sets, the same software, albeit some software updates give some a miniscule fraction more computing power, but it's rather infinitesimal in the grand scheme of things. This was not the case to begin with, as the people who had access to the technology got it first, and then the people who didn't have access, well, it's best to not speak about them.

At first it was difficult. Many did not adjust well. A laundry list of psychiatric illnesses sprouted up, as well as some physical illnesses. From malfunctions and the sorts. But soon, the laggards were spooked by the innovators, followed by the early adopters, then completely wiped out and rendered obsolete by the early and late majorities. Unfortunately, there were some that did not adopt, and they merely became extinct, but they could have adopted at any time. A few bands of them live in the forests and highlands and mountains of our great Earth, thus comes the objective of my task set out by my superior.

So my superior gave me the coordinates and I hurried over. On the way, I recalled my past interactions with laggard artists. There were two instances, both of which, like everything else, I remembered perfectly.

The first artist created sculptures out of sticks, all of which with seemingly no rhyme or reason, except out of boredom. The number of sticks and stones in each sculpture changed, as did the type of sticks, their length, width, and color, the same goes for the stones. It was as if she blindly grabbed a bundle and threw them all together without any thought, but she caught the attention of my superior after she had made a dozen of these sculptures. The whole business of it seemed unproductive, but she carried on for many months. When I visited her for inspection, she provided no reason for making the sculptures other than thinking they looked ‘ pretty,'and was a way to pass the time. I left and reported to my superior that there was no concern.

The second artist was a man who painted his dwelling made of wood and mud using red pigment found in ochre. When I questioned the potential artist on why he chose to paint his dwelling and why he chose red, the man simply stated that the color red, like he'seen on apples and poppies and autumn foliage and ladybugs and red foxes — he stated a much longer list but I've shortened it here for brevity's sake )— was pretty. I left and reported to my superior that the artist simply suffered from whimsical observation.

The third artist was the artist I would be meeting today. My superior informed me that he had been writing, which prompted me to remind my superior that writing wasn't against the rules, as many of the primitive laggards wrote their names, lists of things to gather, and messages to each other, but my superior remarked that this artist was not writing any of those sorts of things. Instead, he was writing in longform, in the old, antiquated way of authors and poets from long ago. In all the time since our integration, and subsequent separation, we have not had a writer like this in millennia. At first we had many among the non-adopters, who ignited several rallying cries which were either extinguished or became obsolete on their own, and the amount of writers and leaders and spokespeople dwindled until there were no more. Given the history of this trade, and as my job as an information officer, I went to investigate.

My data was transferred to the nearest relay station to the artist, then uploaded and interlinked with my human figure, which was put in a vehicle driven deep into the forest.

I reached the artist's home. He lived in a shack made of wood walls with stone quoins in the corners and a thatched roof of reeds on top. Behind the shack was a garden of fruits and vegetables, and a well with the same thatched roof enclosed in a fence of sticks. It was one of the more impressive homes I had seen among the non-adopters; the design was very symmetrical ( at least to the average-seeing eye and not to a measuring device ).

It is impossible for me to talk to non-adopters. They are much too slow and inefficient, and the delays for which they require for communication is impossible for me to replicate. On missions like this I have to refactor my speech and hearing processors. I have to lubricate my mouth and ears— anatomical features that I, unlike many of my peers, still possess due to the nature of my work, but rarely use outside of talking with laggards.

I knocked on the door made of reeds and could hear shuffling from inside. The door opened and the artist stood in front of me. He looked at my feet first, a peculiar decision as humans make eye contact to express attention and interest, not feet contact; nonetheless he looked at my feet, then up my whole body until his eyes reached mine. He looked at them for quite some time — a few seconds worth, an amount of time in which I could have listed every letter in every alphabet in every language ever existed, but I decided to look back at him for what felt like centuries, for reciprocal eye contact was a module of trust.

He left the reed door open for me to walk through. Although I was provided with the information on how he would greet me, he did not shake my hand or say hello. Instead he walked back inside and sat at a table made of wood, where he wrote in 22nd century English on a large clay tablet using charcoal. I lubricated my glands, licked my lips, flexed my jaw, and said hello, although I may have said something invalid as the artist gave no reciprocal response.

I took a microsecond to examine the configuration of his dwelling. There were so many inconsistencies with how he decorated his home I had to turn off my intelligent vision to avoid a bodily migraine.

The ears stuck to the sides of my head vibrated at the sound of the charcoal rubbing against the clay. It was an undesirable sound and I wanted it to stop quickly so I asked the artist his name. He gave no response and proceeded diligently with his writing. I asked where he was from (one of the many non-adopter conversational topics I was provided before my mission), but still he would not reply.

I examined the writing on the clay tablet.

The words themselves made sense, although they were quite old, but the sentences in which they were configured didn't. It was as if he was writing every word that became visible in his head. It could also be the case that there was information that was either omitted or forgotten to be given to me prior to my mission. Regardless, I felt that this writing could be of interest to my superior.

I asked the artist what he was writing.

The rubbing of clay stopped. He looked up at me with a negative expression for what again, felt like millenia but was only a few seconds to the non-adopter. Then his expression changed. He was smiling, then he output a laugh, jiggled his head and went back to his clay and charcoal.

I left the artist's home and reported the results to my supervisor.

“He didn't say anything to you?”

“No, supervisor.”

The transmitting signals lept all over my supervisor's neural interface. It was apparent that my supervisor was intrigued.

“Hmm. He must also suffer from whimsical observation.”

“Yes, supervisor.”